Day 75: Tain

Distance: 12.7 miles
Drams: wee

It's hard to believe that we're a week away from John o'Groats. We knew this last stretch would be a long slog on roads. At least today they were pretty quiet. Our host, Ali, in Alness gave us back roads directions to Tain, where he grew up.


For a while we were parallel to the Cromarty Firth and had a nice view of the oil drilling platforms with this big old church in the foreground.

The weather continues to be unseasonably cold and rainy, but Al and I agree that we would rather have it cold than hot. It's really very good walking weather. I have noticed that I have really weird hand tan though. There's a clear line where the cuff of my rain jacket sleeve lies. It's worse than farmer tan!

So the walk today was pretty uneventful. We saw some cows who seemed very curious about us. The moved en masse down their field to check us out.


Then they followed along for a bit, occasionally running away then turning and following again. It was very strange.


We also passed a house that was flying this flag.


No idea what that is all about and we didn't stick around to ask questions.

We reached Tain in time for lunch, so stopped at the Royal Hotel for a nice lunch. Here's a picture of Al I took there. I really like it!


Our plan for the short day was to get to the B&B early and go down to the Glenmorangie Distillery for a tour. It worked out great. The tour was not as good as the one at Glengoyne, but the whisky was very good. The only problem is that you only got one wee taste, and you weren't able to choose which one. We tasted the 12 year old that spent 2 years in sauternes barrels.


Our tour guide, Connie, was lovely, but lacked the big, and loud, personality of David, our guide at Glengoyne.


Glenmorangie does have the most beautiful stills, 12 in all. They added 4 a few years back when LVMH, the French luxury goods giant, took them over so they could up production to 6 million litres of whisky a year.


But the most important thing we learned was how to pronounce the name. The second G isn't hard, it's soft. So it's Glen-morange-ee. The middle is like orange but with an m.

So that was day 75. We have another short day tomorrow to Dornoch. We will spend almost the entire day on a big A road because Dornoch is across the Dornoch Firth from here, and the only way over is a 2 mile long bridge on the highway. We hear Dornoch is a really pretty little town, so we should have time to check it out.

Location:Morangie Rd,Tain,United Kingdom